Galton carried this "science" to an appallingly racist conclusion, asserting that high-achieving Black people could never rank higher than the average Anglo-Saxon, and that statistically the race was inferior. ![]() Galton disregarded "pretensions of natural equality" and concluded that high achievers tended to have children, brothers or cousins who were also well accomplished. In 1869, he published "Hereditary Genius," a book arguing that human intelligence and other mental attributes were biologically inherited. He concluded that cats were best at hearing extremely high-pitched sounds, ascribing the feline ability to his cousin Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection, arguing that cats had evolved this shrill skill to detect squeaking mice.īut Galton's primary interest was developing a scientific study of human differences. Galton tested his whistle at London's Zoological Gardens, placing it near different animals and observing their reactions to blasts emitted at different frequencies. The device we now think of as a dog whistle was designed by Francis Galton, whose most famous work was inventing the term "eugenics" and creating a science of racial differences and race "improvement." By the 1870s, Galton had developed a whistle whose tube length could be precisely adjusted by a plug that screwed into its base - changing the tone it produced. So why has the dog whistle become the metaphor of choice? The racist roots of dog whistle technology itself point to some answers. There are several technologies that can transmit messages to exclusive audiences, from WWII-era Enigma machines to encrypted WhatsApp messages. Each time someone calls out acts of coded racism as a "dog whistle," that's proof that the "wrong" audience heard it. And yet the fact that this phrase gets used so often is proof that the metaphor fails. Over time, the technology has become a stand-in for something uttered publicly but heard privately - a secret signal. Dog whistles work by producing sounds at frequencies that canines can hear but humans cannot. It is a specific technology: a manufactured object constructed to make use of both physical laws (acoustics) and biological ones (the hearing abilities of animals). ![]() The phrase has become so cliche that we may forget that a dog whistle is more than a style of speaking. But President Donald Trump may represent the perfection of "dog-whistle politics," using phrases, symbols and tweets to create plausible deniability whenever his policies seem too overtly racist. The term "racist dog whistle" is not new.
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